


decommissioned

by quadrille



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies), Pacific Rim: Uprising
Genre: Brother-Sister Relationships, Drift Bond, F/M, Fix-It, Mid-Canon, Pacific Rim Uprising, Post-Canon, Post-Movie: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), The Drift (Pacific Rim), Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-30
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-04-15 02:19:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14149800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quadrille/pseuds/quadrille
Summary: Your fate can rest on the turn of a dime, the abyssal space between one second and the next: whether or not you successfully take out a kaiju before it chews through your connpod; one malfunction in a knee servo which means you’re down for the count; one missile bay that doesn’t open properly; whether Striker Eureka was slammed to the left or right, which decides whether it’s father or son who breaks his arm, and thus who stays behind while the other goes into the Breach; or an enormous metal hand just barely grazing the hull of a helicopter.---How it should have gone. Plus: whatever happened to Raleigh Becket? Mid-Uprising & after. Spoilers.





	decommissioned

One of the first things you learn in the Jaeger Corps is how fragile luck can be.

Your fate can rest on the turn of a dime, the abyssal space between one second and the next: whether or not you successfully take out a kaiju before it chews through your connpod; one malfunction in a knee servo which means you’re down for the count; one missile bay that doesn’t open properly; whether Striker Eureka was slammed to the left or right, which decides whether it’s father or son who breaks his arm, and thus who stays behind while the other goes into the Breach; or an enormous metal hand just barely grazing the hull of a helicopter.

And so: it turns out differently.

Jake catches his sister at the very last second with an almost gentle touch, her helicopter cradled in Gipsy Avenger’s hand as he raises it up to the connpod’s eye-level. And he can see Mako peering out, her hand splayed against the glass. His relief shudders through the connection until Nate can feel it, until Nate has to fight back that clench of emotion in the back of his throat, too.

  


* * *

  


“Are you voting no to the drones?” he asks her a day later, after the doctors have signed her off as okay; mild bruising, mild whiplash, but that’s it.

“Of course,” Mako says without hesitation.

Would a remote-controlled jaeger have reacted quickly enough to have saved her life? Possibly not; there’s those split-second decisions she knows so well, the milliseconds that tilt one way or the other, the tiny lag introduced by waiting for signals to hit the jaeger and broadcast data back and forth. Signals that can be intercepted, too. Or there’s the altruistic risks that a reckless remote pilot might not bother taking when staring down the maw of a kaiju.

She remembers Raleigh’s memories of a stormy, wind-lashed night off the coast of Alaska, and him carefully lifting a ship out of the way and to safety, much like her brother just did for her.

  


* * *

  


But in the end, the vote doesn’t make much difference. The drones aren’t officially deployed, but they simply rip their way out of the underbelly of Shao Industries instead, tearing their way out of their construction cradles, swarming from the factories and causing a cascade failure as all the switches trip at once and the company loses control over their weaponry.

Marshal Quan is shouting orders from the command center as the drones descend. Those familiar klaxon wails are rising and rising around the shatterdome, and Mako can feel her blood running cold as it plants her right here, in this spot, remembering the last time she felt like this: twenty-two years old and eager and angry, and the war is starting again, as she always knew it would.

  


* * *

  


The entire Moyulan Shatterdome is a hive of activity, practically humming beneath Jake’s footsteps. The energy is familiar from his years in training, but there’s an even more frenetic strain to it now, a reek of desperation in their work. There are more industrial-strength vats of coffee in the kitchens, and he can hear the distant buzz of generators and welding torches and alarms at all hours.

The only silence is when he closes the vault of his quarters against the rest of the world, settling into his cot amongst cold metal and rivets and blast doors. Being a Ranger comes with its perks; namely, his own bedroom and privacy, which he never had while in training. The silence is different, and therefore almost unsettling. He’s a little jealous of the cadets in their dormitory, the bunk beds and shared whispers and muffled laughter after hours and all waking up at the same time, yawning, bleary-eyed and pulling on their boots.

Finally, restless, Jake goes wandering.

Towards the kitchens, as always, his favourite place. Back in the training program, he was notorious for his sweet tooth and late-night snacks. He’s half-hoping to run into Nate again — he loves rattling his old friend’s cage, knocking down some of that stuffiness — but this time, he’s surprised to see Jules sitting alone at the metal table, brooding over a cup of coffee. 

When she sees him run to a complete startled stop, pausing in that doorway, she smirks. He’s terrible at hiding his emotions. “You’re not the only one who has trouble sleeping, Pentecost. Pull up a chair?” 

She’s added spices to tonight’s vat: a stick of cinnamon, some nutmeg and cloves, an orange peel. Even that, too, is an unfamiliar sight for him: ten years ago, sweetener and extra flavourings were almost unheard-of in his Shatterdome. It had better rations than most cities, but still, everyone drank their coffee black or not at all.

“Sorry for disturbing you. I mean, that is, _if_ I disturbed you—” Jake grabs his own mug and a ladle, pouring himself some of the Mexican coffee. He glances at her calloused hands where they curl around the mug; Jules’ fingernails are worn down to shreds, a bloody band-aid fraying from the crook of her thumb.

When she sees him looking at the smear of red, she shrugs. “We’re working on a deadline,” she says wryly. Dark circles of exhaustion are carved into the hollows under her eyes, but it doesn’t stop her from looking any less lovely.

“If anyone can get it done on time, you will,” Jake announces, with a faux bravado that, in his quieter moments, he’s pretty sure he lifted from his father. “No one’s had any better engineers than the PPDC. You all work goddamn miracles.”

It’s almost funny, that he’s the one supporting her. Because if the engineers fail to cobble together these jaegers, if they assemble it wrong or don’t quite finish all the repair checks, it’s Jake Pentecost and Nate Lambert and those kids who are going to die — not the engineers, safe in their boltholes. That guilt keeps her awake, keeps her working until she bleeds. And Jules’ world-weary look shows that she knows it, knows the weight on her shoulders, on his, on all of theirs. “You know, I’m not sure I’m the one supposed to be receiving this pep talk,” she points out. “There are some terrified cadets just a couple hallways over.”

“I’ll hit ‘em up later. You’re getting the practice version. Nate gets the final; he’s probably crying in his bunk right about now, so he needs all the motivational speech-ing I can give.”

Jules’ laugh is warm and rich, and she looks almost surprised that there’s still room in her to laugh. Jake feels the surge of pride and satisfaction of having caused that. Of being responsible for that expression lighting up her face.

  


* * *

  


There’s snow on Mt. Fuji, a kaiju carcass looms over them a couple hundred meters away, and his heart is feeling properly light for the first time in weeks when Amara smashes another snowball into the back of his head.

Jake chases his partner around the steep incline, both of them hobbling in their suits, laughing, the pent-up adrenaline turning into giddy silly joy. Liwen Shao has settled herself on an outcropping of rock, and still looks unexpectedly graceful despite her disheveled hair, a smudge of dirt across her cheek, her sweaty tank top. After stumbling around for a while, the exhaustion of the last battle and the weight of the jaeger suit finally makes Jake drop as if his strings have been cut, collapsing onto the cold ground. He tries to make a snow angel, briefly, but then just settles for lying there fatigued and relieved instead, staring up into the blue, blue sky.

“Are you seriously making a snow angel right now?” He hears Amara demand, skeptically, from above him.

“Try it. It’s kinda fun.”

A moment later, she flops down beside him.

“Thanks, Shao!” the teenager yells out, and the woman wearily waves off the gratitude, as if clinging to the back of a jaeger plummeting through the atmosphere is nothing to talk about.

  


* * *

  


That night, Jake and Mako stand side-by-side in the Hall of Heroes. Their father’s illuminated holo is beside Chuck Hansen, as it always has been. The fallen cadet, Suresh, has been added to their ranks, and Jake says in a sombre and sober voice: “I’m glad it wasn’t worse, man.”

Mako has been standing stiff and formal beside him, but then leans into her younger brother. Just a little. “It was a success. All things considered. Almost all of them came back; that’s a miracle.”

“Hey, y’know, I’ve been wondering for a while,” Jake says after a pause. “Do you know where Becket is?” 

The conspicuous beat where Mako doesn’t answer tells him everything he needs to know. He chuckles. “We all knew he vanished. But Drift co-pilots… I figured, if anyone knew where he’d gone off to, it was you.”

  


* * *

  


It’s a quiet beach house on the coast of Maine. Today is grey and overcast, but the distant sound of the waves is soothing (no matter where he went in the world, he always needed to be near the ocean). White seashells are littering the beach, scoured clean, and a one-man sailing skiff is tied up at the pier. Mako walks right up to the porch and lets herself in.

Raleigh’s house is cluttered, but homey: there’s an old photograph of him and Yancy pinned to pride-of-place on a corkboard; a newer one of him and his sister Jazmine in front of this very house; one of Mako at a _xiaolong bao_ hole-in-the-wall in Shanghai, her usually reserved expression flowering into a brilliant smile. The salt-warped floor always creaks, whines with movement, announcing each step. He made most of the furniture himself.

The retired pilot rises from his sprawl on the sofa as soon as he hears her arrival, like a dog perking up, and Mako steps into his arms. His hands are calloused, but from building things rather than destroying them, and making objects more meaningful than the Wall of Life. Raleigh rests his hand on her back, fingertips curving over the knots of her spine. Mako leans into the touch, feels a shiver start to work its way up her back.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there,” he says, immediately, and they exchange a wry look.

Could they have suited up and taken Gipsy Avenger for a ride themselves? Maybe. But their combat reflexes are softened from ten years of peace. And he’s been out of commission, advised by every doctor not to step back into a jaeger after the doses of radiation he took, like her father had, and detonating Gipsy Danger in the Breach made it even worse. He risks seizures if he syncs up those neural nets again.

And besides. He’s already paid his dues to the war. 

“You didn’t need to be there,” she says, even if there’s the unspoken _though I would have liked you to be._

“Still. I’m sorry I missed it. It all went sour so quickly — I saw the breaches opening and Tokyo on the news, so I started looking up flights, but everything to East Asia was grounded — I was gonna start calling PPDC off the hook in case they could get me out there faster, but Marshal Quan wasn’t answering.”

“He died in the attack on the Shatterdome.”

“Fuck.” Raleigh’s voice is a low hiss. He’s feeling it, then: the painful awareness of how close they got. Of how close she got. “How bad’s the damage in Moyulan?”

“We’ll recover.” 

“Wasn’t my question.”

“I know.” The smallest tug of a smile in the corner of her mouth.

He eventually sighs, loosens up. “C’mon. You can tell me all about it over dinner.” The man finally detaches and wanders over to the kitchen, to start pulling ingredients from the fridge (and old-fashioned icebox, for those nights when the storms get bad and the power gets knocked out, and they have to turn to generators and the fireplace to stay warm).

With their minds free to decouple, to breathe and grow apart, it’s been years since they last ghost-drifted, their minds blurring and bleeding over into each other despite no longer being hooked together. But this woman is still an extension of him, the other half he never thought he’d find again after Yancy.

So Mako moves effortlessly around Raleigh in the kitchen, the pair of them in a well-executed and unconscious dance — boiling water for tea, a sizzling pan, scraping dumplings and bok choy onto a plate, the woman ducking under his arm to fetch mugs. Once everything’s assembled, she pauses behind him, nose pressed between his shoulder blades, breathing in the smell of his oversized knit sweater, his detergent. It’s not the acrid, semi-stale scent of the jaeger suit, all metal and plasteel and burnt-out circuits and convection fluid; it’s real, it’s reassuringly warm and alive and human, and it’s her Raleigh.

“ _I’ve invited Jake to visit, if that’s acceptable_ ,” she says in Japanese. They slip back and forth like this sometimes, code-switching as appropriate, picking up and dusting off whichever language feels right for the moment; his Japanese is decent, though his accent is sloppy, and so sometimes she speaks to him in her mothertongue and he answers likewise in English. (There’s the occasional sprinkling of Québécois French, too, usually for cursing whenever he clips his finger with a hammer.)

But at her suggestion, Raleigh nods, brightening. “Yeah, that’d be good. I haven’t seen him in… hell, years, probably? You guys weren’t really speaking the last time I met him. I’d be surprised if he even knows I’m still alive.”

“He’s doing well. The whole experience was… surprisingly good for him, I think. He’s becoming more responsible. He has a girlfriend in the engineering corps now. And… a boyfriend? His co-pilot, Lambert. To be honest, I don’t know what they’re all doing.”

Raleigh’s laugh is infectious. “Spoken like a true jaeger pilot who doesn’t understand anything that doesn’t come in sets of two.”

She blushes. “Whatever it is, I’m happy for them.”

  


* * *

  


Later that night (with the sound of the sea easing into white noise), Mako sends a text to her brother with a set of GPS coordinates, the blue lighting up her face, and then she eventually pads over to the bed on bare feet and slips under the covers, shivering. Raleigh flips the blankets over her and she practically glues herself to his side, where he grumbles, “Jesus, your feet are always _icicles_ ,” and she laughs into his shoulder, burrows her nose against the side of his arm, the familiar map of scars and burnt flesh tracing his skin.

These days, he’s stiff in the left shoulder on cold mornings, the same arm Gipsy lost in the fight with Knifehead. Despite years of studying the technology, the psyche analysts and doctors still can’t quite pinpoint the myriad side-effects of being a Jaeger pilot, the radiation and neurological damage hammering the human body with a whole host of problems.

Still: he’s alive.

Raleigh’s voice is so soft, against her hair and the top of her head, that she’s not sure if she’s imagining it when she hears him say, _I’m glad you came back to me._

But then, he doesn’t have to: it’s been ten years since they Drifted together, but she can still hear his voice clear as day, singing in the back of her skull, a warmth beside her, Mako’s body curled around Raleigh’s, the pair of them like curved parentheses. As they always have been; as they always will.


End file.
